Just in case you’re looking for a breakout board for your ESP3212 (rather than the boring old ESP8266), Tindie has you covered for that, too. It doesn’t have the neato prototyping area that our previous offering had (in fact, as far as I can see, it doesn’t have anything at all, except for 0.1″ spaced connectors for all of the ESP32 pins), but it is considerably cheaper, at only $1.49 plus postage. Of course, first you need that ESP3212.

CNX Software, a site definitely worth adding to your bookmarks, has just published a short list of ESP32 development boards, gleaned mainly from blogs and social media sites. Some of them are work-in-progress and some of them appear to be vapourware, but it’s still an interesting article and a nice little teaser for those of us still searching for someone to throw a few dollars at for a real, live ESP32.

This picture of the WROOM-32 module pinouts has been produced by Alberto Piganti (PighiXXX). I would have dismissed it as an April Fools Day joke, especially given the strange capacitor layout around the antenna area …but it’s August and, more importantly, the

I really don’t know whether this is a mock-up, prototype, or just a rendering based on the pin-outs and top-view outline available in the datasheet (although it is most likely the latter) and right at this moment I don’t have the time to be able to follow-up. So if any of you interested readers out there would like to do some sleuthing, please carry on and let us know what you find out in the comments section.

Just in case you haven’t already seen it, here’s the announcement from Espressif of their new, ESP32 chip.

John Lee (of Espressif) has also just noted on his twitter account that, “ESP32 and ESP8266 target slightly different markets. They do share very similar APIs. ESP32 is not a replacement for ESP8266!“. He also suggests in a different post that the plan is to lower the price of the existing ESP8266 chips at the beginning of next year and bring the ESP32 to market at a price “slightly above” that of the current ESP8266. Apart from the obvious pricing information, that also implies that we’ll be seeing the new chip in the wild very soon. That’s the good news …but it’s worth remembering that John is talking about the chips themselves, so how much that price increase affects the module pricing remains to be seen, especially as the new features (BLE, extra I/O’s, etc.) imply extra board real-estate and increased component count at module level. We should probably steel ourselves for a not-insignificant retail price hike between the ESP8266 and ESP32 modules.

Update –Pete Scargill has received an early version of the ESP32 module PCB layout from Espressif. Go to his blog (also available in the sidebar links section) to see the whole thing and read more about what people think the layout implies about the capabilities of the new chip.